I'm glad it was helpful, and sorry you're going through a situation that sounds really awful. The one saving grace of my experience was that it happened fairly early on in the therapeutic relationship; I know it would have been much more difficult and terrible feeling if I'd had more trust and vulnerability established and had invested more into that therapist.

There has been one silver lining--sometimes stories of bad past experiences make a great litmus test for potential new therapists. I was apprehensive about telling my current therapist about that particular misadventure of vindictive termination, but I ended up blurting it out in our first or second session because it was so specifically relevant to a question he asked. Two years later, I can still picture exactly how my current therapist reacted--his eyes bugged out with horror, he asked a bunch of incredulous questions about whether the ****** therapist was extremely inexperienced (he wasn't), responded warmly but laughed enthusiastically at the jokes I made about it. It was one of the moments that really cemented the fact that my current therapist was a good egg, and really helped to let me know I could start building trust with him.